State of the Union

Department of Prisons inmate transfer bus waits for protesters at the NC General Assembly David Biesack / cc

“In a mess, she is.” So man of letters and fellow Tar Heel Reynolds Price described a character in his essay Scars. So too could he describe the current political atmosphere in North Carolina.

For the first time since Reconstruction, the GOP has taken control of the governor’s mansion and both houses of North Carolina’s General Assembly. For the past ten consecutive Mondays, protestors led by The Rev. Dr. William Barber II of the NC NAACP have filled Halifax Mall outside of the General Assembly building in Raleigh.

North Carolina General Assembly law enforcement officers, who have arrested more people in the past three months than they have in the past six years, load school buses full of handcuffed, collar-wearing clergy members each week, to ship to the jail down the street.

And each Monday, the same things happen again — more signs, more hashtags, more bullhorns, more yelling, more standing, more police officers, more handcuffs, more buses, and more future court appearances.

During the first few “Moral Mondays,” I wanted to be among the ministers, priests, rabbis, and university professors arrested. I chose not to, in part, because I would lose my prison visitation rights as a (God-willing) future clergyman. Instead of having my hands zip-tied, I watched, wrote, “liked” photos, and retweeted updates.

I realized over the past few Mondays, however, that there haven’t been any updates. There haven’t been any developments. Substantive positions aside, both camps simply trade feelings of indignation, resentment, and annoyance every seven days. And I’ve been right there with them.

Richard Beck, a psychology professor at Abilene Christian University in Texas, writes on his blog this week about sin and mercy:

I was reading Sara Miles’ book Jesus Freak and came across these lines:

“I tried to remember what Jesus preached constantly: mercy. It sounded like an abstract theological principle, but I clung to it to keep me afloat in what was otherwise an inexplicable sea of human sin. Mercy. It was all that could help me give up my self-pity and judgment.”

An inexplicable sea of human sin. Whenever Jana and I are trying to explain the stupidity, vanity, meanness, thoughtlessness, shallowness, duplicitousness and self-absorption of ourselves and others we are, more and more often, using this shorthand assessment: “It’s just sin.”

Which makes us sound like crazy Christian fundamentalists. But the tone we are using is not one of rage and judgment but that of pity, sympathy, and sad resignation. We are, pretty much all the time, a sad and sorry lot.

The character of “Moral Monday” has been all of the above. From the duplicitousness of legislators tacking on abortion restrictions to motorcycle safety laws without public notice, to the vanity and meanness of protestors holding signs that state, “You have Republicans in your vagina,” the climate has been one of sin — of the “pity, sympathy, sad resignation” sort — and no mercy.